Trio Areal performs a programme of piano trios at once united by folk music and contrasting in aesthetic, creating a varied and fascinating journey through this most intimate of chamber genres. They move from Frank Martin'sTrio sur des melodies populaires irlandaises to Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67, culminating in the world premiere recording of the Piano Trio No. 3 by Tofig Bakikhanov (b. 1930), one of the most significant of today's Azerbaijani composers.
Founded in 2020 at the Zurcher Hochschule der Kunste in Zurich, this Trio of talented and promising young musicians, Daria, Jamila and Sandro, began playing together in the famous Toni Areal building, where the idea for the Trio's name was born. The Trio is particularly drawn to the idea of folk ideas subtly embedded in music, and selected three composers whose output epitomises this approach. Swiss composer Frank Martin was of Huguenot extraction, while Azerbaijani composer Tofig Bakikhanov's lineage stretches back to nomadic Persian tribes, the Baku khans. Shostakovich, meanwhile, was of Siberian and Polish descent, and he turned to Jewish folk music in numerous compositions as a means of expressing the plight of persecuted peoples in the Second World War.
Frank Martin'sTrio sur des melodies populaires irlandaises was written after he had studied collections of Irish folksongs at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Frank said of the piece,"this Trio hardly draws on harmony and the polyphonic principle of imitation; everything is achieved through the rhythm and melody that forms the basis of Irish song and dance". Throughout the work, the Irish themes are frequently shrouded by Martin's impressionistic style. Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 is a powerfully moving piece that culminates in a finale in which Jewish musical idioms are woven into the score as an allusion to the Holocaust victims to whom he was paying tribute in this work. Bakikhanov's Piano Trio No. 3 dates from 1979 and is cast in two movements, ranging in style between the lushness of Rachmaninov's piano writing to the street-music ease of Reinhardt and Grappelli, both of which are contrasted with the more sinister elements at play, but which ultimately transform those elements into something more hopeful.
